Florida Lawmakers' Property Tax Shell Game

The Sun-Sentinel's Anthony Man puts two and two together-- and notices that Florida lawmakers' actions on property tax reform this year didn't really match their rhetoric:

The Florida Legislature ended its annual session without achieving its No. 1 goal: reducing property taxes. Legislators did, however, vote to increase property taxes by $546 million.It happened because of the way Florida allocates money for schools. The new state budget, effective in July, increases spending on education and orders local school boards to charge higher property taxes to pay for it....In other words, representatives and senators of both parties voted for higher local property taxes for schools at the same time they were declaring property taxes in Florida have reached crisis levels and must be cut.

The Sun-Sentinel's Man clearly sees this as an act of cowardice and hypocrisy on the part of legislative leaders-- and he's probably right:

Lawmakers could have reduced property taxes for schools, or held them steady, without cutting money for classrooms by shifting funding priorities in the state budget. But that would force them to make difficult spending choices -- just the way they want municipal and county governments to make tough choices about local spending.

Man's criticism is right on. The ongoing Florida fiscal crisis was created, at least in part, by the unwillingness of state leaders to enact sustainable tax reform at the state level. Instead, they cut state taxes pell mell and "paid for it" by shifting costs to local governments. For local leaders facing the prospect of budget cuts, the hypocrisy of state leaders' insistence that locals must make difficult fiscal policy choices must seem gallingly hypocritical. At long last, state lawmakers should be called to account for this fiscal shell game.